Hannah Pick-Goslar, 1929-2022
She was one of Anne Frank's first friends, and one of the last people to see her alive.
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“Anne came to the barbed-wire fence—I couldn’t see her. The fence and the straw were between us. There wasn’t much light. Maybe I saw her shadow. It wasn’t the same Anne. She was a broken girl. I probably was, too, but it was so terrible.”
On October 28, Hannah Pick-Goslar, often described as “Anne Frank’s best friend,” died at the age of 93. A few years ago, on a trip to Israel, where she lived, I considered asking to interview her, but I was at the beginning of my research and felt that it would be presumptuous. I pictured myself just the latest in a long line of reporters, biographers, filmmakers, and others seeking to eke out of her some previously undiscussed tidbit about her friend. Over the course of her long life, Pick-Goslar gave many interviews about Anne. Could I really expect to learn anything new from this elderly woman who had last seen Anne some eighty years earlier?
As it happens, that encounter was a significant one. Pick-Goslar, whom Anne knew as Hanneli Goslar, was one of the last people to see Anne alive.
Refugees from Berlin, the Goslar family immigrated to the Netherlands at around the same time as the Franks (who came from Frankfurt am Main). Edith Frank and Ruth Goslar first met in the grocery store, where they bonded over their mutual confusion regarding the Dutch language. Hannah and Anne attended the same kindergarten, where Anne, Hannah recalled, greeted her on the first day with a big hug. “We sat side by side in the Montessori school in Amsterdam for six years, and whispered in class, and the teacher could never separate us, no matter how hard she tried,” she would later remember. On their first day at the Jewish Lyceum, where they were placed in different classes, Anne—age twelve—insisted that Hannah be transferred into hers.
The Franks went into hiding in early July 1942, after Margot Frank was named among the first wave of Jews called to report for so-called “labor service in Germany” (in fact, deportation to Auschwitz). But the Goslars had to stay put. Ruth was pregnant, and the family also had a two-year-old. With the tiny cramped spaces and the need to be silent all day long, it was impossible to take a toddler into hiding. Instead, thanks to an uncle in neutral Switzerland, the family bought Paraguayan passports, which granted them a temporary exemption from deportation. Hannah continued to attend the Jewish Lyceum, though the number of students dwindled from week to week as more and more were deported.
The Goslars held out in Amsterdam until June 1943, when they were deported in one of the last major round-ups: “A passport no longer helped,” Hannah said later. Ruth had died while giving birth to her third child, but Hannah, her father, and her little sister were able to stay together. After months in Westerbork, the transit camp for Dutch Jews in the northeastern Netherlands, they arrived at Bergen-Belsen in February 1944. Thanks to those passports, they traveled there by a normal passenger train and were assigned to a “privileged” area of the camp, where they got to keep their own clothes and could stay together as a family: “We slept in different places, but we could see each other every evening.”
Bergen-Belsen, like Westerbork, was established as a transit camp, not an extermination camp; there were no gas chambers. But during the last months of the war, as the Russians approached Poland, the Nazis transferred massive numbers of prisoners westward. The camp grew horrifically crowded, with sanitary conditions quickly breaking down and typhus spreading rampantly. Anne and Margot were among a group of around seven thousand women prisoners transferred from Auschwitz in October 1944. (Edith remained behind in Auschwitz to die there.) The Nazis set up makeshift tents in an empty area of the camp to accommodate this group. From her side of the camp, Hannah could see the tents, but she didn’t know who they were for.
The flimsy tents were no match for the brutal north German winter. One day the wind blew them down altogether. The Nazis packed prisoners more tightly in the existing barracks to free up space, replacing the double-decker bunks in Hannah’s part of the camp with triple-tier bunks. They also built a barbed-wire fence through the center of the camp, filling it with straw to prevent the prisoners from seeing through it. “But we were, of course, very close to each other, because the camp wasn’t large,” Hannah remembered.
In early February, Hannah learned that there were Dutch people on the other side of the camp—Anne among them. That night, she went to the fence and called for her friend.
“Anne came to the barbed-wire fence—I couldn’t see her. The fence and the straw were between us. There wasn’t much light. Maybe I saw her shadow. It wasn’t the same Anne. She was a broken girl. I probably was, too, but it was so terrible.”
“I don’t have any parents anymore,” Anne told Hannah. (She was wrong—Otto was still alive in Auschwitz. Hannah would later wonder if Anne might have survived if she had known her father was still living.) Hannah told Anne that her own father was very sick, and the girls cried together.
“We don’t have anything at all to eat here, almost nothing, and we are cold; we don’t have any clothes,” Anne lamented. Hannah had just received a small package from the Red Cross, “about the size of a book,” containing crackers and cookies. The next night, she threw it over the fence to Anne, but “there were a lot of other hungry women.” Someone else caught the package and ran off with it. Anne began to scream. “It was so sad. I had to calm her down.”
A few days later they tried again, and this time Anne caught the package. But on February 25, 1945, Hannah’s father died. When Hannah went to look for Anne again afterward, that section had been emptied, all its inhabitants transferred to a different part of the camp. She never saw Anne again.
This image of Anne in her final days—which Pick-Goslar told to Willy Lindwer, a Dutch journalist who produced the film (and later book) The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1988)—has haunted me for decades. In an essay about children’s Holocaust books that I published a few years ago in The New Yorker, I wrote about how reading about the Holocaust as a child gave me a sense of a false promise: the books seemed to provide a way to understand the losses suffered by my own grandparents (and so many others), but there remained an unbridgeable gulf between the world of books like Anne’s diary and the reality of what had happened. “The chatty, cheerful girl [of the diary] had become a person I couldn’t identify with at all: skeletal, desperate, scrabbling for food,” I wrote. “She had gone to a place I couldn’t follow, not even in my imagination.”
I never did bring myself to interview Pick-Goslar; the account of her experience here is based on publicly available sources, including a video testimony she recorded for Yad Vashem. I couldn’t imagine asking her the kinds of questions a biographer normally does, seeking information to realistically describe a scene or achieve insight into someone’s state of mind. When Anne screamed to you over the fence, what exactly did she say? Tell me what she looked like, with as much detail as possible. Can you sketch a map of the camp and show me where you were standing? Even for a biographer, there are limits. I wish I could know the answers to those questions. But I think it was right not to ask them.
In a famous essay called “Who Owns Anne Frank?”, Cynthia Ozick vehemently rebukes those who seek to emphasize the upbeat nature of Anne’s work without also acknowledging her brutal death. The Anne at the barbed-wire fence—bald, emaciated, in rags, screaming at the theft of her food—will never appear on the cover of any book. But she is the shadow face of the smiling girl whose image we know so well. Without the testimony of Hannah Pick-Goslar, her story would be incomplete.
What I’m reading
On Twitter, Maggie Smith (@maggiesmithpoet) offers this great idea for a holiday gift: preorder books coming out early next year! A DIY book subscription plan.
I’m looking forward to many new releases for next year, but here’s a few to get started:
Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You (Feb)
Luiz Schwarcz, The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression (Feb)
Zoje Stage, Mothered (March)
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (March)
Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal (April)
Ava Chin, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (April)
Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (April)
And if you need a book right this second, I was honored to contribute to Maus Now, an anthology of criticism about Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
Where I’ll be
On December 14, I’m moderating an event at the Paley Center in Manhattan in honor of the 75th anniversary of the publication of Anne’s diary. The illustrious panel includes Melissa Gilbert, who starred in the TV movie of The Diary of Anne Frank (1980); historian Lynn Novick; TV producer Tony Phelan; and Sharon R. Douglas, head of the Anne Frank Center USA. Tickets available here.
From the Shirley Jackson files
I was ridiculously honored to find Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life ranked #4 on Esquire’s list of the 50 best biographies of all time! Other great books on this list include Caro’s The Power Broker, Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, and (at #1) Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello.
As ever,
Ruth
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Wonderful, as always. Thank you!
I read that you could not imagine what Anne had gone through or how she must have felt during the last days of her life. Sadly, I can.